


A Motion and a Spirit

by monstergabe (aproposity)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Implied Body Horror, M/M, canonically-based presumed MCD., one instance of a homophobic slur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 05:21:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aproposity/pseuds/monstergabe
Summary: Five years of media speculation and the truth seems so irrelevant. The facts, then: a fire; a fight; a fall.

It takes a milestone anniversary for Gabriel to finally pay Jack a visit.





	A Motion and a Spirit

**Author's Note:**

> Title refers to Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey, which shouldn't be as relevant as it is here, but is. Read it and weep.
> 
> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://monstergabe.tumblr.com/)!

The address is cripplingly easy to find, once he knows what to look for. Official reports claimed that their flight from the farm had been as quick and efficient as the amputation a gangrene-infested limb – they had simply vanished into the night, and so he’d had to fall back on other channels. Pictures attached to outdated news reports, blogs of remembrance travel writers, even forum posts on local websites. Sombra had been the crucial help he needed to tunnel fact out of rumour. She’d kept so many of his secrets, what was one more added to the pile?

“Tread lightly with this one,” she’d told him, uncharacteristically gentle. She might as well not have bothered. Five years has taught him patience, and going in guns blazing is only his M.O. when he has a plan to pair with it.

His first move is to keep his distance until he’s managed to reconstruct his face properly. It takes a little over a week, sat cross-legged in the middle of a motel room with wallpaper peeling off the walls much the same way as his skin peels away from his flesh, the damp seeping through to stain its pattern a laughable counterpart to his persistent vitiligo.

It’s difficult; the mask had been confining and so, left unbidden over the months he’d been wearing it, bone had molded to it like a cast. More than that, excavating the remnants of Gabriel Reyes is not unlike trying to push thread through the eye of a needle. The truth of him has shrunken over time until there is only an idea, beaten into shape on the streets of LA and then tempered by the twin traumas of the SEP program and the Omnic War. Gabriel Reyes wore the milestones of his life on his body; it's fitting, then, that these days it's been reduced to smoke and mirrors. It also makes it that much harder to reshape him. Though as any good tailor knows, with a bit of patience the thread will eventually catch, and so the end of the week finds him off the bedroom floor and under the bleached glare of the light spilling down over the bathroom mirror, experiencing the uncanniness of wearing a dead man's face.

He got the broad strokes right, at least: the colour of his eyes, skin, hair. But there are inaccuracies too, like a painting's skewed perspective, rendering it strange and unnatural. He remembers having facial scars, but it's been so long that he can't recall the length of them, the angle, where they sat on his face. His eyes are too sunken in, his mouth a touch too wide, and he can't say for certain how many times his nose had been broken over the years. And yet, when he moves his jaw with the professional touch of a pathologist, scrutinizing how it connects to the hinge, how the bone grinds together, it's reassuringly human. The cut of his cheekbones connect to his nose correctly. His tongue is pink. His teeth are square. He has the correct set of eyes.

It’ll do.

The body armor he leaves behind, and his weaponry. He keeps the coat. It makes for a poor shield in combat, but no amount of kevlar will be of use here. He packs the mask away delicately, wraps it in the ugly puke-yellow of the single polyester pillowcase kindly provided by the motel staff, the softest fabric he has to hand. The way the material falls upon its face resembles a death shroud, and when he closes the drawer on it he can still see it in his mind's eye, the truth of what he is.

Gabriel leaves quickly after that, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign still swinging on the handle as he reaches the end of the corridor. He tips the maid as he walks by just to make certain she doesn’t think to pry, and steps onto the street feeling like he’s wearing a stranger’s skin.

Finding the correct house isn’t difficult even with the lack of a number plate. When he knocks, it’s under the glare of a glass peephole set deep in the middle of a shabby little front door desperately in need of a fresh coat of paint. He ducks his head, the week’s exertion too fresh to be standing up to scrutiny this soon. It’s here that doubt decides to gnaw at him, even with all his research. After the fall, they’d been hounded by the media and political mobs alike and to combat it they’d drifted, throwing themselves upon the tide of anonymity and being washed back upon the shore again and again. Indiana was all they’d known. They could only go so far.

But they’d known him once, too. It’s the ace in his pocket, what he’s counting on will urge them to open up, and his patience is rewarded when the door finally swings inwards.

“You,” she says, looking entirely unsurprised to see him.

Age has been kind to her, he thinks. It’s been twenty years since Gabriel last laid eyes on her, give or take, and while the lines on her face are numerous where previously there were none he’s surprised that she still seems so _young_. Then he remembers that he’s been surrounded by soldiers all his life, who have a tendency to age exponentially after every battle fought. The quiet life – the farmer’s life – is tough, but not so tough as that.

“You died,” she tells him.

“Not quite.”

The conversation stalls, Gabriel holding open the storm door, she holding open the front door. He waits, allowing her time to realise the plain truth of it. He is here. He is _here_ , and he is alone.

It happens in the space between one second and the next. Her anger swells the same way Gabriel remembers of Jack: like the darkening of clouds before a storm, settling in the curve of her cheekbones and her brow-bone. There are questions tucked away there, too. _Why you, and not him? Did you at least try and spare him? Did he die in your arms, the way he joked about so many times?_ Gabriel can see them all, pulling at the corner of her mouth like a fish-hook. She doesn’t say any of them aloud. Instead, she tips her head back in a show of defiance Gabriel knows all too well, the sun-kissed grey of her hair sliding off her shoulders, and lets the door swing fully open.

When he hesitates that fish-hook tugs one side of her mouth into a look of pure disdain. “You a vampire now, that you need to be invited in proper?”

His boots are loud, too heavy on the bare floorboards even without his combat load weighing him down. The little house barely resembles the previous one she lived in, but there’s the same distinct feeling of taking up too much space. Even with the warmest of welcomes, Indiana has a habit of taking an innate dislike to brown-skinned city boys ignorant of farming methods and small town tradition, and it’s not about to give it up today. The welcome this time is only approaching lukewarm.

She follows him through the mud room and into what passes for a living space, and in the silence it strikes him that she has been alone all these years. Then, his eyes fall on a walking stick grizzled with age, the handle curled around the back of a chair at the head of the breakfast table, an abandoned cup of black coffee on the place setting before it. The relief that someone is still here with her is only matched in its intensity by the surprise that he cared all that much.

“Your husband?” he asks, because the silence has gone on for too long, and because she saw him looking.

“Out.” She takes a seat at the table, to the left of its head. “The electrical company...”

“I don’t see what use they would have for a retired dairy farmer.”

She throws him an unimpressed look. “Manual labour’s a good skill to have when batteries weigh too much for the skinny men in suits to lift by themselves.”

She doesn’t make any motion for him to sit, but he’s never been one to wait for open invitation. He lowers himself down opposite her, digesting all the things she isn’t saying. It’s her turn to wait for him to catch up as he appraises the room that carries the story of her life after the fall. Beyond its sparsity, a lifetime’s worth of knick-knacks crowd together on DIY shelving units and pokey side-tables. Nothing appears to have its own place, and it’s disorienting; like someone had picked up the living room in his memory, shook it, and then settled it back down in a small and decrepit townhouse. Unbidden, Gabriel recalls the sugar bowl’s place on the kitchen bench, next to a box of eggs traded from the neighbouring farm. Now it sits forlornly in the middle of the breakfast table, an ugly web of super-glued cracks marring its surface. Bottom line, the place is only a little more dressed up than a squalor.

“I have money,” he tells her, before he can stop himself. “I could –”

“I don’t want a goddamn thing from you.”

The words themselves are fire but she is calm, lacking the heat of them. She reaches out for the cold cup of coffee her husband neglected hours ago, carefully spoons a single heap of sugar into it, and takes a mouthful. Gabriel is learning patience, but she has been in the habit of it for years and a war of attrition is destined to end in her favour.

“I want to see him.”

“No,” she returns immediately, on the fringes of cutting him off. Gabriel is suddenly, painfully aware that she knew what he would ask if he ever darkened her door alone, long before he ever even noticed he'd been drifting with unsteady purpose towards the midwest. Thrown, his mouth works soundlessly for a moment. Her pale eyes remain fixed on his face, unblinking, and in the shafts of summer sunlight the lines of her crow's feet resemble battle scars. Victory scars.

“It’s imperative that I see him,” he insists, when his larynx is stable enough that he can trust himself to speak without smoke curling from his mouth.

“Well maybe he don’t want to see _you_ ,” she bites back, a quick flash of her canines as her upper lip curls. The coffee cup comes down against the table a touch too forcefully.

He smiles at that, grimly, because it’s true and because she of all people would know, but more immediately the thought – _ah, I forgot that’s where he gets it from._

They had a common purpose, once. A common purpose that Gabriel had spectacularly failed, absolutely, but Jack had the uncanny ability to bind nations with the same blood they’d spilled fighting each other. The heartfelt promise of _I'll keep him safe, ma'am, voy a_ was hardly so delicate, though just as binding. Consequently, if it were anyone else he would interrogate, threaten, hold the things she held dear hostage until she told him exactly what he wanted. But it’s _her,_ and that alone brings them to an impasse.

No, he won’t hurt her. But nor will he leave, and it doesn’t take her long to realise it.

“He’s not here.” The confession comes quietly, and it takes a moment for her to gather herself up and continue. “After we lost the farm… we didn’t want to move him. It was his home, he grew up there.” She sounds defensive, like this isn’t the first time she’s had to argue the decision.

“He belonged with me.”

It’s a supremely stupid thing to say to her face, but it’s the kind of impulsion that the man he's dressed up to be wouldn't shy away from. He braces for an attack, for whatever is holding her together to finally fracture and leave her free to come screaming hellfire at him.

She doesn’t, of course. She’s made from far harder stuff than Gabriel Reyes ever was.

“Funny. He told it almost the same, ‘cept the other way 'round – that _you_ belonged with _him_.” Her eyes are sharp again, as sharp as her teeth. “So why you standing here talking to me?”

It’s a loaded question; one he can’t answer, and one he doesn’t really believe she wants him to answer. Five years of media speculation and the truth seems so irrelevant. The facts, then: a fire; a fight; a fall. This too: that Gabriel has killed enough people in close-quarters to know what it is to feel hatred from another person, but he doesn’t believe anyone has wanted him dead more than Mrs. Morrison. So, he does the decent thing for once and makes a retreat.

What he doesn’t expect is for her to follow him, planting herself in the doorway once he crosses the threshold. When he turns to face her the first thing he notices are the way her nails bite into the door-jamb, the skin at her first and second knuckles stretched tight from the strength of her grip.

“Don’t come back here again, boy. You ain’t welcome.”

Her accent is thick; thicker than Jack’s ever was, but where Jack had struggled to be taken seriously as a rookie in the SEP there is no room to underestimate this woman, whose only historic value was as a mother and the rest lost to obscurity. Still, it was something that even _he_ had overlooked, with all his tactical experience: that this is the woman with the mettle to raise a hero. Gabriel takes pause to regard her in that light and feels his body slide to attention of its own accord.

“I have what I need. You won’t be seeing me again.”

“Is that a promise?” she sneers at him, the parting shot right before she shuts the door in his face.

He lets her have that one, impressed. A dairy farmer’s wife, and yet her aim is every bit as true as her son’s.

Seeing the farm in his mind’s eye is akin to peering through a fog bank, but it’s just close enough that he could melt away on the steps of the porch and emerge at its creaking front gate in the space of a moment. But while he’d settled into the shape of Gabriel Reyes well enough, the odds that he could pull himself back together in all the right ways is a nagging uncertainty. If he is to see this through, he wants to be as he would have been remembered.

The trek out of town is little more than a half-hour on foot, and in that time he acquires plenty of looks. It’s either the incongruity of a coat in the middle of summer or perhaps murky recognition that draws their eyes, but no one tries to stop him. Pavement leads to asphalt leads to a dirt track, and a cluster of gutted buildings that once teemed with animal and human life.

The farm is more than simply a mere shell of itself. The fields are overgrown, grass yellowed from lack of irrigation and choked by sand burrs where it sprouts out of the mole-infested dirt. Graffiti mars the walls of the empty cattle house, it’s doors swinging on their hinges and revealing flashes of tired slogans that even Gabriel at the height of his disillusionment had long grown bored of reading off protest placards. _'NOVERWATCH!'. 'We don't want to be WATCHED!'. 'Jack Morrison: TRAITOR!'._ Still, the Indiana youth seem to have more artistic flavour to them than the folks in D.C. He feels his lip curl at one image showcasing particularly crude talent: Jack on his knees, recognisable only for the wild spray of blue signifying his Strike Commander greatcoat, swallowing the cartoon dick of a faceless, suited UN official. Jack's sexuality had always been the talk of every town, especially for little men who just couldn't stomach the idea of a puto saving the world.

He turns its back on it, leaves the grisly monument to whatever purpose it’s serving these days. Instead, he makes his way up the hill overlooking the farmhouse.

The headstone is so unassuming that Gabriel almost doesn’t notice it at first, the grass growing high and thick around it where it sits at the very crest of the hill. The flash of recognition is less an acknowledgement of what it _is_ , but more in line with the surprise appearance of a lover, crushingly simple: _Oh. There you are._

“Hey, sunshine.”

The words they prepared for him are plain. A name. A matching pair of dates, too close for comfort. And one title, holding more significance on this hill-top overlooking an abandoned Indiana dairy farm than all those bestowed upon its fraternal twin at Arlington, more than any crown a roundtable of politicians tried to place on Jack Morrison's golden head. _Son_.

He traces each individual letter with a steady hand, the surface rough and uneven yet pleasantly warm to the touch after a day of the sun beating down upon it. Granite, not marble, a testimony to the shallow pockets of the Morrison family and Jack’s life insurance frozen in an account somewhere, lost in the tunnels of government records. And yet solid, just like the oak tree swaying overhead, like the bowed spine of the Morrison matriarch, who had refused out of bare principle to ask him whether or not he killed her son. Like Jack, who burned and burned and burned.

“Tu madre is a real hardass, Jack,” he says to the air, tipping his head back. The oak casts its branches overhead, its leaves flushed a deep, dark green. The trunk is solid enough that a grown man's arms wouldn't meet if he were to embrace it, planted deep in the earth with the confidence that  no amount of force could move it. He spies a the frayed rope cinched tight around a branch, cut short when the Morrisons realised their only child had outgrown tire swings. The taste of copper sits heavy in his mouth, and the hollow parts of Gabriel ache. “Nothing you didn't know already.”

There is so much more he wants to say. The words crowd at the back of his throat, against what passes for his teeth, so insistent that his jaw clenches involuntarily. Talking had always caused more problems than it solved when it came to Jack and himself, and in the later months had been more frequently accompanied with bloodied mouths and hands.

It was easy to talk. Saying the right things, however, is something Gabriel had never managed to get the hang of, and five years of drifting meant little room to practice. Jack had been good at it, where it counted: addressing a crowd, a rookie, a council meeting. But his words lived in politics, not the quiet of secluded rooms they all too often invaded to have it out with each other. Talking with Jack meant Jack talking _at_ him in clipped, unoriginal expressions ripped straight from his conference notes, until he had them tied up in so much verbal bureaucracy it ceased to be about anything other than the next mission , the expectations the UN had for them, until eventually Gabriel forced the subject back around to them in the only way he knew how: by taking a swing at him.

Talking became synonymous with fighting, and so by the end they simply never talked. It seemed too little too late to be starting now.

Instead, he takes a knee. The sun is at his back and it leaves the headstone draped in the shade of his own shape, wisps of himself curling away on the summer breeze. It was careless, coming here. In Arlington he could stand it, the polished face of Strike Commander Morrison lifted up to the sky with as much personality as every other pristine white headstone surrounding it. Here, Jack is everywhere, as cloying as the heat settling in the folds of his coat and Gabriel can feel the _idea_ of himself, the mental thread used to stitch himself together, coming apart at the seams. There is only Jack, and the memory of the last time Gabriel had set foot here: sprawled under an old oak tree, baking in the afternoon sun and the heavy weight of Jack’s body, a shoulder tucked under his armpit and the soft, golden hair at Jack’s temple against his mouth.

Here, under an Indiana sky, he could disappear completely.


End file.
